Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To investigate symptom clusters (SCs) and sentinel symptoms in patients with lymphoma during chemotherapy treatment and examine the associations between sentinel symptoms and laboratory parameters. DESIGN: This was a single-centre cross-sectional study. SETTING: Data collection was conducted through the General Information Questionnaire and the Chinese version of the Memorial Symptom Assessment Scale. Exploratory factor analysis was used to extract SCs, and association rule mining employing the Apriori algorithm was implemented to identify sentinel symptoms. Correlation analysis was used to explore the correlation between sentinel symptoms and laboratory indicators. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 268 valid questionnaires were collected from patients. OUTCOME MEASURES: Explore SCs and sentinel symptoms in patients with lymphoma during chemotherapy and analyse the correlation between sentinel symptoms and laboratory indicators. RESULTS: Four distinct SCs were identified among the participants. Drowsiness, nausea, sweating and skin changes were determined as sentinel symptoms of emotional-fatigue-sleep, nutritional metabolism, lymphoma-specific and chemotherapy-body SCs, respectively. Among these symptoms, drowsiness demonstrated positive associations with white blood cell count and glutamic pyruvic transaminase levels, while exhibiting negative associations with haemoglobin, platelet and albumin levels. Sweating exhibited negative associations with platelet count. Skin changes demonstrated negative associations with D-dimer levels. There were no significant associations detected between nausea and laboratory parameters. CONCLUSIONS: Patients receiving lymphoma chemotherapy exhibited various symptoms manifesting as four distinct SCs. The identified sentinel symptoms comprised drowsiness, nausea, sweating and skin changes. With the exception of nausea, all variables demonstrated significant associations with multiple laboratory parameters. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: ChiCTR2500096487.